“Paul Tweed made his name suing news organizations like CNN, Forbes and The National Enquirer on behalf of Hollywood movie stars, winning high-profile cases for celebrities like Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake by hopscotching among Belfast, London and Dublin to take advantage of their favorable defamation or privacy laws.” . . .

“Germany is now requiring social media companies to remove any hate speech within 24 hours after their notification of its posting, forcing teams of Facebook employees to evaluate the content almost as editors do. A new European Union regulation to protect online privacy that goes into effect this Friday is providing new opportunities for lawyers to sue. Congress is weighing legislation to require internet companies to disclose the buyers of political advertising, just as traditional news media outlets have to do.”

We should do all of the above, asap. It is OK with me to call Facebook a platform, rather than a publisher, but it still needs strict , adult, government regulation, to require it not to be a rogue nuisance and force for evil. Germany has passed a 50 Million Euro fine for not removing fake news quickly. We should implement the German actions now, before the next election.

David Lindsay Jr. is the author of “The Tay Son Rebellion, Historical Fiction of Eighteenth-century Vietnam,” and blogs at TheTaySonRebellion.com and InconvenientNews.wordpress.com

This is the text of a lecture delivered at the University of Michigan on Tuesday. The speech was sponsored by Wallace House.

“I’d like to express my appreciation for Lynette Clemetson and her team at Knight-Wallace for hosting me in Ann Arbor today. It’s a great honor. I think of Knight-Wallace as a citadel of American journalism. And, Lord knows, we need a few citadels, because journalism today is a profession under several sieges.

To name a few:

There is the economic siege, particularly the collapse of traditional revenue streams, which has undermined the ability of scores of news organizations to remain financially healthy and invest in the kind of in-depth investigative, enterprise, local and foreign reporting this country so desperately needs.

There is a cultural siege, as exemplified by the fact that a growing number of Americans seem to think that if something is reported in the so-called mainstream media, it is ipso facto untrue.”

David Lindsay: “Excellent piece. I applaud it. I also recommended the two top comments, which reflect my concerns, as someone who wrote to the NYT complaining that Amy Chosick was on occassion unfair to Hillary Clinton, and appeared to hate her. Chosick has written a book, where she has admitted to her distaste for Hillary’s aloofness.

Lynn
New YorkFeb. 22
“Some readers, for example, still resent The Times for some of the unflattering coverage of Hillary Clinton throughout the campaign, as if the paper’s patriotic duty was to write fluff pieces about her in order to smooth her way to high office.”

No, we resent you for not doing what you so righteously claim to do. We resent you for not covering Hillary Clinton’s daily, substantive, issue-oriented responses to voters’ serious questions, and instead shallow email email email.

It even went so far that when your reporter, Amy Chozik, wrote about the book of policies Clinton and Kaine put together, all Chozik described were book sales.

The 2016 election was a perfect case study: a serious, policy-wonk candidate who devoted time to talk with a wide-range of stakeholders and to put together serious proposals to address a wide range of problems vs a candidate whose “policy” was to say “you’re really going to like it, believe me” or to claim “cheaper better” health care with no further details.

The serious policy proposals were ignored, the candidate who proposed them rejected as a poor politician, because details are boring and slogans are catchy.

And, after such shallow campaign reporting, you complain that readers aren’t interested in long-form journalism. We did not want “fluff”–which is what we got (and polls)–what we wanted was long-form journalism. The Times’ campaign coverage was sound-bites, personalities, and polls, and, of course, emails. Do better next time.

13 Replies481 Recommended

Paul-A commented February 22
P
Paul-A
St. Lawrence, NYFeb. 22
Times Pick
While I don’t always agree with Stephens, he’s the most thoughtful of the conservative columnists at the NYTimes; and this piece demonstrates his insightfulness.

However, there’s an important issue that he glosses over in this column. He does note that Rightwing media like Fox, Limbaugh, Beck, the Hill, Breitbart, etc. stopped being “news” outlets a long time ago. But he’s implying that most media on the Left have been following suit, and are drifting almost as far over the edge. This is a false equivalence.

Does he really believe that even the most Lefty media (like MSNBC and Huffington Post) are becoming nearly as bad as Fox and Breitbart?

And he also fails to acknowledge the impact that time adds to the equation: Rightwing media became partisan propaganda 20+ years ago, and their brainwashing/poisoning of our political and journalism discourse has accumulated to be ingrained in 35% of our citizens. The Left’s drift leftward has only been a recent response, in order to try to save our country.

And he also omits discussion of putatively moderate/reasonable Rightwing media, such as the Wall Street Journal (where hs used to work). The WSJ is much more biased than the NYTimes, or even the Washington Post. Yet why didn’t he speak out against that drift when he wrote for them? Why didn’t he decry what Fox et al were doing to “conservative news” over the past decades?

Reasonable conservatives need to come to terms with their silent complicity in what has brought us here.

I recently realized an idea that could help the survival of the New York Times Paper Edition for several more centuries. Perhaps I exaggerate, but it is unlikely you will be around to know.

We read the New York Times paper edition religiously Friday through Sunday, and there is always an awkward and embarrassing conflict. We can not comfortably share the first section. While I am reading the front page and its leads into the depths of section one, my fabulous lady cannot read the editorial page and op-ed page, since they are attached umbilicallly to the front page and page three, and vice a versa.

Alas, this conflict has disturbed the wa, or peace and harmony, of our household.

The solution is so simple. Just move the editorial page and op-ed page to the center of section one, as a two sheaf, with 4 printed paged Pullout, so one member of a household can read the front page, and the contents of section one, while another member of the household can read the editorials and op–ed.

The only possible improvement to this simple idea, would be to cut the center sheaf into two separate pages, so that one could pull out both the editorial page and op-ed page separately, so that three people could enjoy starting with section one at the same time.

David Lindsay Jr. is the author of The Tay Son Rebellion, Historical Fiction of Eighteenth-century Vietnam, which came out this September, and blogs at The TaySonRebellion.com and InconvenientNewsWorldwide.wordpress.com

“Revelations about how Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that worked for Donald Trump’s campaign, amassed data about more than 50 million Facebook users without their consent has forced the social media company to tell anyone who will listen that it takes privacy very seriously. Last week, Facebook said it was simplifying and centralizing privacy settings, making it easier for its more than two billion users to change how much personal information they share. That was an important and necessary change, but what we have learned about the data collection practices of social media firms, advertisers, political campaigns, online publishers and other groups suggests that company-specific changes like Facebook’s will be insufficient. What is needed is for Congress to adopt rigorous and comprehensive privacy laws.

The technology and advertising industries have long resisted such rules, and neither this Congress nor the Trump administration has shown any interest in privacy. But someday new politicians will be in charge, and now is as good a time as any to begin a serious examination of how American privacy regulations can be strengthened.”

The concept of collecting “only as much customer information as needed to perform a function” does not provide the privacy one might expect. Because of the way modern database technology works, it’s relatively easy, and cheap, to aggregate information about a person from multiple sources.

One web site may ask for only your birth month, another, only your birth year. In isolation it seems like OK information to give up, but when it’s aggregated together by data brokers it’s possible to get an individuals exact birth date.

Sites may only ask for the last 4 digits of your SSN, but the first 5 digits can be easily constructed from your place and year of birth.

Opt-in, opt-out approaches are not solutions to privacy for this reason. We need to establish, in law, that the individual person “owns” his or her “data”. “Privacy” should be based on that fundamental “right”.
93 recommended

“But the liberal establishment’s fixation on Facebook’s 2016 sins — first the transmission of fake news and now the exploitation of its data by the Trump campaign or its appendages — still feels like a classic example of blaming something new because it’s new when it’s the old thing that mattered more. Or of blaming something new because you thought that “new” meant “good,” that the use of social-media data by campaigns would always help tech-savvy liberals and not their troglodytic rivals — and the shock of discovering otherwise obscures the more important role that older forms of media played in making the Trump era a reality.

No doubt all the activity on Facebook and the apparent use of Facebook’s data had some impact, somewhere, on Trump’s surprise victory. But the media format that really made him president, the one whose weaknesses and perversities and polarizing tendencies he brilliantly exploited, wasn’t Zuckerberg’s unreal kingdom; it wasn’t even the Twitter platform where Trump struts and frets and rages daily. It was that old pre-internet standby, broadcast and cable television, and especially TV news.

Start with the fake news that laid the foundation for Trump’s presidential campaign — not the sort that circulates under clickbait headlines in your Facebook feed, but the sort broadcast in prime time by NBC, under the label of reality TV. Yes, as media sophisticates we’re all supposed to know that “reality” means “fake,” but in the beginning nobody marketed “The Apprentice” that way; across most of its run you saw a much-bankrupted real estate tycoon portrayed, week after week and season after season, as a titan of industry, the for-serious greatest businessman in the world.”

David Lindsay Jr. Hamden, CT Pending Approval
Atta boy Douthat, as my father liked to say, You’re not as dumb as you look.

The commenters tear at your arguments on the periphery, and some them make good points, but the heart of your argument is impeccable. I hope the TV executives and managers and talking heads are taking notes.

im·pec·ca·ble NYT, why is there no spell check in this writing box. Help us out.

“WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission is preparing a full repeal of net neutrality rules that require broadband providers to give consumers equal access to all content on the internet, putting more power in the hands of those companies to dictate people’s online experiences.

Ajit Pai, the chairman of the F.C.C., plans to reveal a sweeping proposal to scrap the net neutrality rules on Tuesday, according to two people familiar with the plan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details are not public. The rules, created during the Obama administration, prohibit broadband providers from blocking, slowing down or charging more for the delivery of certain internet content. The proposal will be presented in a December meeting of F.C.C. commissioners and is expected to pass in a 3-to-2 vote along party lines.”

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CTPending Approval

Help, Help, Stop these people. I am not an expert on this complicated subject, but there was a terrific video on youtube by John Oliver, explaining Net Neutrality. The Obama Administration regulators decided the public needed this protection for a good reason. It will be all too easy for big corporations to stiffle competion, benefiting themselves at the expense of consumers and the ecoomy.

“Joseph Mitchell, whose stories about ordinary people created extraordinary journalism in the pages of The New Yorker, died of cancer yesterday at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan. He was 87 and lived in Manhattan.At the height of his creative powers, from the 1930’s to the mid-60’s, Mr. Mitchell tended to avoid the standard fare of journalists: interviews with moguls, tycoons, movie stars and captains of industry. Instead, he pursued the generals of nuisance: flops, drunks, con artists, panhandlers, gin-mill owners and their bellicose bartenders, at least one flea circus operator, a man who sold racing cockroaches, a bearded lady and a fast talker who claimed to have written nine million words of “An Oral History of Our Times” when, in fact, he had written no words at all.

Mr. Mitchell was also the poet of the waterfront, of the limelight of New York’s greatness as a seaport, of the Fulton Fish Market, of the clammers on Long Island and the oystermen on Staten Island: people who caught, sold and ate seafood and talked about it incessantly. One Sunday in August 1937, he placed third in a clam-eating tournament at Block Island after consuming 84 cherrystones. He regarded that, he said, as “one of the few worthwhile achievements” of his life.

For him, people were always as big as their dreams, as mellow as the ale they nursed in the shadows of McSorley’s saloon off Cooper Square in the East Village. He wrote during a time when New Yorkers were mostly convinced that they were of good heart and that they had the best of intentions, whatever the rest of the world thought of their abrasivness and contentiousness. Mr. Mitchell’s articles offered evidence that they were right.When somebody suggested that he wrote about the “little people,” he replied that there were no little people in his work. “They are as big as you are, whoever you are,” he said.”

“It was the latest action by Mr. Pai, who was appointed by President Trump in January, to overhaul the media industry. Since Mr. Pai has taken the top seat at the F.C.C., his deregulatory actions have ushered in the possibility of consolidation in the broadcast television industry.

In the spring, soon after he lifted a cap on how many stations a single company can own, the Sinclair Broadcast Group announced its intention to buy Tribune Media for $3.9 billion. The merger, which the F.C.C. and the Department of Justice are reviewing, would give Sinclair access to more than 70 percent of all television viewers in the United States. This week, the commission’s Republican majority lifted rules that required television stations owners to operate a main studio in each locality, which Mr. Pai said was unnecessary and costly for TV station owners.”

Sinclair was featured recently in a Public Televisionn News Hour expose, as extremely right wing, evil, and forcing its editorials on the thousands of local TV news shows it owns. These local news companies do not have editorial control. This is essentially a right wing conspiracy that is real.

“WASHINGTON — Senator John McCain and two Democratic senators will move on Thursday to force Facebook, Google and other internet companies to disclose who is purchasing online political advertising, after revelations that Russian-linked operatives bought deceptive ads in the run-up to the 2016 election with no disclosure required.

But the tech industry, which has worked to thwart previous efforts to mandate such disclosure, is mobilizing an army of lobbyists and lawyers — including a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s campaign — to help shape proposed regulations. Long before the 2016 election, the adviser, Marc E. Elias, helped Facebook and Google request exemptions from the Federal Election Commission to existing disclosure rules, arguing that ads on the respective platforms were too small to fit disclaimers listing their sponsors.”

They bring tears to my eyes. Here are some critical comments I support.

ChristineMcM is a trusted commenter Massachusetts 2 hours ago

“And, in the weeks leading up to the introduction of the Klobuchar-Warner-McCain bill, Facebook told congressional aides that it is too difficult to figure out if an ad is political or commercial because candidates are often changing messages and topics. The company added that with the sheer number of ads on the site, the engineering involved in identifying political ads would be extremely challenging.”

Sure. Very challenging to their bottom line. I think social media companies should be subject to the same disclosure rules as TV ads, revealing the source behind the ad if not the funding (we can thank Citizens United for that one).

I listened to Cheryl Sandberg responding to critiques at a forum about online truth in advertising, and found her to be both patronizing and insincere–all that talk about “transparency” from the most nontransparent company around.

Bottom line is Facebook, Google and lesser companies won’t change their wild west communication culture unless forced–and they know what following strict FEC laws will cost them, an amount they’re simply not willing to pay.

Their excuse such disclaimers would “stand in the way of innovation” makes me gag–why don’t they just come out and say it, “stand in the way of profits”?

They also know that forcing transparency as the senators propose is probably the last thing this administration–which prospers by falsehood–is interested in.

123Recommended

Erik New York 2 hours ago

Time for these companies to own up to the fact, that they are, at least in part, responsible for the whole Trump presidency debacle. We need to know how it happened so we can take steps to make sure nothing like this happens again. We are all paying for their lack of diligence and greed.

116Recommended

JDH NY 2 hours ago

The WWW is no longer the Wild Wild West. FB and the other carriers of information to the general public have willingly become the modern Trojan Horse. The refusal to see the merits of regulation, including disclaimer rules, as a means to protect the public from propagandist use of the platform, is based on one thing and one thing alone. Greed. The argument that regulation would “stand in the way of innovation” has no merit. Until these companies take their responsibility to the public seriously, we will be vulnerable to a large percentage of that public making choices based on information presented to manipulate. The reasons for political advertising regulation have been well thought out and to say that the internet’s presentation of that advertising is any different is disingenuous at best.

“Finally on Thursday, speaking on Facebook Live, Zuckerberg said he would give Congress more than 3,000 ads linked to Russia. As one Facebooker posted: “Why did it take EIGHT MONTHS to get here?”

Hillary is right that this $500 billion company has a lot to answer for in allowing the baby-photo-sharing site to be turned into what, with Twitter, The Times’s Scott Shane called “engines of deception and propaganda.” ”

“As Vanity Fair pointed out, Mueller’s focus on social media during the campaign could spell trouble for Jared Kushner, who once bragged that he had called his Silicon Valley friends to get a tutorial in Facebook microtargeting and brought in Cambridge Analytica — Robert Mercer is a big investor — to help build a $400 million operation for his father-in-law’s campaign.

Some lawmakers suspect that the Russians had help in figuring out which women and blacks to target in precincts in Wisconsin and Michigan.”

“The Sandberg admission was also game, set and match for Elon Musk, who has been sounding the alarm for years about the danger of Silicon Valley’s creations and A.I. mind children getting out of control and hurting humanity. His pleas for safeguards and regulations have been mocked as “hysterical” and “pretty irresponsible” by Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg, whose project last year was building a Jarvis-style A.I. butler for his home, likes to paint himself as an optimist and Musk as a doomsday prophet. But Sandberg’s comment shows that Musk is right: The digerati at Facebook and Google are either being naïve or cynical and greedy in thinking that it’s enough just to have a vague code of conduct that says “Don’t be evil,” as Google does.”

Nice work Maureen Dowd. Here is a comment I support.

Paul Wortman

Yes Maureen, Facebook was used by the Russians. Unfortunately, they exploited a major gap in our campaign laws that do not regulate social media. That, and not just Mark Zuckerberg, is what needs to change. We desperately need to end the money in politics that has bought most of both political parties leaving many angry at the “establishment.” That is why we have Donald Trump in the White House. And don’t forget, The Donald continues to take advantage of Twitter to run a 24/7 political campaign. So, what we’ve learned is that social media can be “weaponized” not just by the Russians, but also by the man now occupying the Oval Office. We need to have “regulation,” but with an anti-regulatory Republican Congress and Supreme Court that is unlikely. Prepare yourself for the battle of the bots in 2020! You can even tweet that if you like.